The average incomes in the agricultural sector are still much lower than the average wages in non-agricultural sectors in the most of the European MS, which is not in line with one of the CAP initial objectives of “ensuring fair standard of living for the agricultural community”. The main aim of this paper is to verify, whether the membership in the EU and utilization of the CAP founds help to reduce relative income gap of farmers. The second aim is to analyse which factors influence this income gap and how. In our study we exploit EAA data from 27 EU MS for the period 1995-2015 and estimate three panel data regression models for all MS, “old” MS and “new” MS. Our results prove that the social goals of the CAP support are not being achieved in the EU-15, however they are achieved under the SAPS in the EU-12.